the first blow towards the execution” (Barksdale,
164). Gray, who Andrews tells us “takes control of
the narrative from the outset” (Andrews, 73), “was
determined that the narrative be read as a terrible
tale of religious dementia” (Andrews, 72), and this
leads to questions of authenticity.
Although he and his followers were caught and
hanged, Turner became and remains a hero for Af-
rican Americans. As Richard Barksdale and Keneth
Kinnamon point out, despite the fact that Turner’s
revolt brought
a wave of repression from slaveholders, it also
energized Black and white abolitionists. The
resulting polarization between the North and
South was necessary... to force the crisis that
culminated in the Civil War and the end of
chattel slavery. As a martyr to Black freedom... Turner set an example that has inspired his
own and succeeding generations (162–163).
Bennett, who calls Turner the “prototype of twen-
tieth century revolutionaries,” writes, “Nat Turner
reminds us that oppression is a kind of violence
which pays in coins of its own minting” (84).
White novelist William Styron denigrated and
spurned Turner’s character through his treatment
and characterization of this historical icon in his
“historical” novel The Confessions of Nat Turner,
earning the ire of African-American scholars,
writers, and historians, who responded in Wil-
liam Styron’s Nat Turner; Ten Black Writers Re-
spond (Beacon Press, 1968). Nevertheless, Turner
is often viewed by black writers and critics as the
embodiment of DAVID WALKER’s An Appeal and,
like FREDERICK DOUGLASS and MALCOLM X, he is
lionized and celebrated in fiction, poetry, and
drama.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First
Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–
- Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.
Barksdale, Richard, and Keneth Kinnamon, eds. Black
Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology.
New York: Macmillan, 1972.
Bennett, Lerone. Pioneers in Protest. Chicago: John-
son Publishing Company, 1968.
Clarke, John H., ed. William Styron’s Nat Turner:
Ten Black Writers Respond. Boston: Beacon Press,
1968.
Loggins, Vernon. The Negro Author: His Development
in America to 1900. Port Washington, N.Y.: Ken-
nikat Press, 1931.
Turner, Nat. The Confessions of Nat Turner. In Black
Writers of America, A Comprehensive Anthology,
edited by Richard Barksdale and Keneth Kinna-
mon, 163–172. New York: Macmillan, 1972.
Rondell Nelson RichardTurpin, Waters E. (1910–1968)
Novelist, critic, and academician Waters E. Turpin
was born in Oxford, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore,
April 9, 1910, to Simon and Rebecca Waters Tur-
pin. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Morgan
College in Baltimore and M.A. and Ed.D. degrees
from Columbia University. Turpin devoted him-
self to college teaching at several historically black
colleges, the last years of which he spent at his
alma mater, now Morgan State University, where
he remained until his death in 1968.
As a novelist, Turpin is best remembered for two
sweeping family chronicles, These Low Grounds
(1937) and O Canaan! (1939). He is also the author
of a historical novel, The Rootless (1957), a play on
the life of FREDERICK DOUGLASS, and St. Michael’s
Dawn (1956). These Low Grounds follows a black
family from pre–Civil War days through four suc-
cessive generations, ending just after the Great De-
pression. O Canaan! concerns the migration of a
black family from rural Mississippi to Chicago in- In the middle of O Canaan!, Turpin incor-
porates a continuation of the plot from These Low
Grounds, extending the chronicle to the latter part
of the 1930s. Taken together, these novels explore
Turpin’s idea that the social tragedy of African
Americans is both cumulative and intertwined, and
the complexity of this situation is underscored by
the complexity of the novels. These works explore
myriad aspects of the black experience, including
Turpin, Waters E. 513